But I Am a Good Person—Why Would God Condemn Me?

But I Am a Good Person—Why Would God Condemn Me?

Perhaps you have heard Christians talk about sin, judgment, and the need for salvation and quietly wondered what any of it has to do with you. You are not a murderer. You have never robbed a bank. You try to be honest. You love your family. You help people when you can. Perhaps you give to charity, care for your neighbors, and treat people with kindness. You know you are not perfect, but neither do you consider yourself a bad person. So why would God condemn someone like you?

That is a fair question, and the answer is not that every unbeliever is secretly a terrible person. I know unbelievers who demonstrate greater kindness, generosity, patience, and compassion toward others than some professing Christians I know. Christianity does not require us to deny what we can plainly see. Nor am I interested in concentrating upon the sliver in someone else’s eye while ignoring the plank in my own. The Christian message is not, “I am better than you.” It is that all of us share a problem that none of us can solve for ourselves.

The mistake begins when we measure our spiritual condition by how we feel about ourselves or by comparing ourselves with other people. God does not ask whether I am better than my neighbor. He does not compare me with a murderer and declare me righteous because I have committed fewer or less grievous sins. His standard is Himself—His perfect righteousness, purity, and holiness.

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

Feeling Healthy Does Not Mean You Are Healthy

Imagine someone who has spent his entire life taking care of himself. He eats properly, exercises regularly, maintains a healthy weight, does not smoke, and generally feels wonderful. Every year he visits his doctor for a physical examination and routine blood work. There is no reason for him to believe anything is seriously wrong.

Then one year the test results come back. Something is abnormal. More tests are ordered, and eventually the doctor tells him something he never expected to hear: “You have cancer.” His first reaction may be disbelief. How can that be? I feel fine. I exercise. I eat properly. I have taken care of myself my entire life.

But feeling healthy did not mean he was healthy. His healthy choices were not bad choices. Eating properly was good. Exercising was good. Taking care of his body was good. None of those things suddenly became worthless simply because cancer was discovered. They simply could not change the diagnosis. The examination did not give him cancer. It revealed something that was already there.

Sin is similar in this respect. We can look at our lives, compare ourselves with the people around us, recognize many genuinely good things we have done, and conclude that everything must be all right between ourselves and God. Yet feeling spiritually healthy does not establish that we are spiritually healthy. We need something outside ourselves by which our condition can be examined. That examination is provided by God.

We Are Not Sinful Because We Sin

There is an important distinction that must be understood. We are not sinful simply because we commit sins. We commit sins because we belong to a humanity that has already been corrupted by sin.

When Adam sinned, something catastrophic happened to humanity. Sin entered the world, death entered through sin, and the human condition became corrupted. Every descendant of Adam is born into that fallen humanity. We inherit mortality, corruption, weakness, and separation from the perfect holiness of God. We do not begin life with the same uncorrupted human condition Adam possessed before the Fall.

“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).

This does not mean that we inherit Adam’s personal guilt. Scripture distinguishes the consequences of another person’s sin from personal judicial guilt. A child can suffer the consequences of Adam’s Fall without being personally guilty of Adam’s transgression. Nevertheless, the child is still born into fallen humanity and therefore requires the cleansing, renewal, and life that only God can provide. This distinction between inherited consequence and personal guilt is important because Scripture does not confuse the two.

Nor does this mean that a young child never does anything sinful. Children can act selfishly, disobey, deceive, become angry, and display many of the same characteristics we see in adults. The question is one of moral accountability. God does not hold someone judicially responsible for moral distinctions that person is incapable of understanding. Scripture itself distinguishes those who knowingly rebel from children who have not yet attained the “knowledge of good or evil” (Deuteronomy 1:39).

As moral understanding develops, however, something else happens. We do not merely possess a corrupted nature. We knowingly and willingly act from it.

There Is No One Who Has Not Sinned

At some point every morally accountable person personally sins. There is only one exception in all of human history: Jesus Christ.

“For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Perhaps you have never committed what society considers a terrible crime. But have you ever knowingly told a lie—even what we sometimes excuse as a little white lie? Have you ever known that someone needed your help, possessed the ability to help, and deliberately refused?

“Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (James 4:17).

We could continue with anger, hatred, lust, selfishness, pride, covetousness, deception, wrongful motives, things said that should never have been said, and things left undone that should have been done. But an endless inventory is unnecessary. We are not trying to determine whether you have sinned more than someone else. We are establishing whether sin is present at all. And Scripture’s diagnosis is universal:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

How Much Poison Is Safe?

Imagine two glasses of water. Someone places a single drop of cyanide into the first and pours a large quantity into the second. Obviously, the two glasses do not contain equal amounts of poison. Yet it would be foolish to drink the first glass simply because the second contains more.

The relevant question is not, “Which glass contains more poison?” The relevant question is, “Is there poison in my glass?”

So it is with sin. Scripture recognizes that some sins are more grievous than others and that our actions can produce vastly different consequences. But another person’s greater sin does not remove mine. A glassful of cyanide in someone else’s glass does not make the drop in mine disappear.

Perhaps you have told only what you consider a harmless lie. It is still a lie. Perhaps someone else has committed adultery, abused another person, stolen millions of dollars, or committed murder. Their greater wickedness cannot make you innocent.

“For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10).

James is not saying that every sin is equally grievous or produces identical consequences. He is saying that once the law has been broken, the person is a lawbreaker. The question of guilt has been established. One drop is not a glassful. But neither is pure.

But Why Would God Condemn Me for That?

This is where many people understandably struggle. Perhaps you readily admit that you have sinned. You simply cannot understand why something you consider relatively insignificant should separate you from God. The difficulty comes partly from how little we comprehend the holiness of God.

We understand that the sun is extraordinarily hot. If a human being of ordinary flesh and blood could somehow approach the sun, he could not survive its presence. The sun would not need to become angry with him. It would not have to hate him. The problem would arise from the nature of the sun and the nature of the person approaching it. The two cannot coexist in such proximity.

Yet God is holier than the sun is hot. God is not merely somewhat better than we are. He is perfectly holy. There is no corruption in Him, no evil, no darkness, no impurity and no unrighteousness.

“God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5).

When Isaiah was given a vision of the Lord, he did not compare himself with murderers, thieves, or the wicked people around him. Confronted with God’s holiness, Isaiah suddenly recognized his own condition:

“Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).

Notice the language: unclean. Isaiah needed cleansing. That is the problem fallen humanity faces. Corruption cannot simply enter the presence of perfect holiness and remain as it is. This is not because God is mean, vindictive, or searching for an excuse to keep otherwise decent people away from Him. It is because holiness belongs to the very nature of God.

But Corruption Is Only Part of Our Problem

If our only problem were the corrupted human condition we inherited through the Fall, we would still require cleansing, renewal, and transformation. But once we knowingly commit sin ourselves, another problem arises. We become personally guilty.

Corruption describes something wrong with our condition. Personal sin describes something we ourselves have done. The first requires cleansing. The second creates a judicial debt before a perfectly just God. And this debt cannot simply be ignored.

“For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

A perfectly righteous judge cannot declare guilt irrelevant merely because he feels compassion toward the guilty person. If justice means anything, wrongdoing must actually be dealt with. God’s love does not cancel His justice, and His justice does not cancel His love. Both are expressions of His perfect character.

This explains why God’s answer to sin is much greater than simply saying, “Never mind. I forgive you.” Our sin carried a cost. Justice required payment.

The God Who Required the Payment Provided It Himself

Here we arrive at the heart of the Gospel. God did not look upon fallen humanity without compassion. Nor did Jesus come to persuade an unwilling Father to forgive us. The same God whose perfect holiness and justice required that sin be dealt with is the God who loved us enough to provide the payment Himself.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

Jesus Christ entered our humanity without sharing our sin. He lived without sin and therefore had no personal debt of His own to pay. Yet He willingly gave Himself for us.

“Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3).

At the Cross, God did not pretend sin did not matter. Neither did He abandon justice in order to demonstrate mercy. Sin was dealt with at terrible cost.

“Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood, to declare His righteousness for the remission of sins that are past…that He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:25–26).

Those words are critical. God remains just while becoming the justifier. He does not forgive us by pretending our guilt never existed. He provides the means by which the demands of justice are satisfied. God’s perfect justice required payment for our sin. God’s perfect love provided the payment Himself.

We Need More Than Forgiveness

Yet even payment for our personal sins does not exhaust what Christ accomplishes for us. Remember that our problem began before the individual sins we committed. We belong to a humanity corrupted by the Fall.

We therefore need both redemption from the consequences of the Fall and forgiveness for our personal sins. We need cleansing from corruption, payment for guilt, reconciliation with God, freedom from death, and ultimately transformation into a condition capable of dwelling forever in His presence. This is why salvation is so much greater than God simply overlooking our mistakes.

“Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:5).

This also helps explain why those who have not yet attained moral accountability still need Christ. They may not yet bear personal judicial guilt for moral choices they were incapable of understanding, but they nevertheless belong to fallen humanity. They remain mortal and corrupted by the consequences of the Fall and therefore require the cleansing, regeneration, and life made possible through Christ. This same distinction is important when considering infants and those incapable of moral accountability.

The morally accountable adult needs that same cleansing—but now also needs the debt of his own personal sins to be paid.

Your Good Deeds Are Not the Problem

None of this requires us to pretend that the good things you have done are secretly evil. If you fed someone who was hungry, that was good. If you cared for a sick neighbor, that was good. If you sacrificed for your children, demonstrated compassion toward someone who was hurting, gave generously to someone in need, or acted honestly when dishonesty would have benefited you, we do not need to call evil what was good.

The problem is that good deeds cannot cleanse corruption, and they cannot erase guilt. Return to the person diagnosed with cancer. Years of healthy eating and exercise may have genuinely benefited his body. But when cancer is discovered, he cannot tell the physician, “I don’t need treatment. Look at all the healthy meals I have eaten.”

The healthy meals are not the problem. They simply are not the cure. Neither can we present our acts of kindness to God as though enough good deeds can remove corruption or pay the debt created by sin.

The Christian Is Not Better—The Christian Has Accepted the Remedy

This is why Christianity should never be presented as righteous Christians looking down upon wicked unbelievers. The ground at the foot of the Cross is occupied by people who needed exactly what Christ came to provide.

The Christian does not stand before the unbeliever saying, “Look how much better I am than you.” He should be able to say, “I discovered that I was sick too. I discovered that I was guilty too. I discovered that I could neither cleanse myself nor pay my own debt. I needed Christ.”

Perhaps you have lived a far more respectable life than many Christians you have encountered. Perhaps you have shown greater kindness. Perhaps your marriage has been stronger, your business dealings more honest, and your concern for others more genuine. None of that needs to be denied.

But another person’s failures cannot cleanse you, and another person’s greater sins cannot make you innocent. The question is not whether you are better than the Christian standing beside you. The question is whether you need Christ.

The Diagnosis Is Serious Because the Remedy Is Necessary

Imagine again the person sitting in the doctor’s office after receiving the unexpected diagnosis of cancer. Suppose the physician then says, “We found it, and there is a treatment.” Would it make sense for the patient to respond, “I don’t want the treatment because I don’t feel sick”?

The purpose of the diagnosis is not humiliation. The physician does not reveal the cancer so that he can feel superior to the patient. The diagnosis matters because without recognizing the condition, the patient will never understand his need for the remedy. The same is true of the Gospel.

God reveals the reality of sin not merely to tell us how terrible we are, but so that we will understand what separates us from Him and why we need the remedy He has provided. You may feel spiritually healthy. You may genuinely have done many good things. You may even be a better neighbor, spouse, parent, employer, employee, or friend than many Christians you know. But none of those things answers the ultimate questions.

Are you uncorrupted? Have you never sinned? If you have sinned, has that sin been paid for?

If the answer reveals that you need Christ, then recognizing that fact is not an insult. It is the beginning of understanding the Gospel.

The Gift of God

Romans does not end its diagnosis with death.

“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

That single verse contains both the problem and the remedy. Sin has wages. God offers a gift. The wages are death. The gift is life. And that life is found in Jesus Christ.

God is not asking you to pretend that you have never done anything good. He is asking you to recognize that goodness cannot make corruption incorruptible and cannot make guilt disappear. He is not asking you to become better than the person beside you. He is calling you to receive what you cannot provide for yourself.

The God who is holier than the sun is hot is also the God who loved us enough to make a way for corrupted and guilty human beings to be cleansed, forgiven, reconciled, and ultimately brought safely into His presence. He did not accomplish that by pretending sin did not matter. He accomplished it at the Cross.

You do not need Christ because you are worse than everyone else. You need Christ for the same reason I do: because we have been corrupted by the Fall, because we have personally sinned, and because only God could provide both the cleansing we need and the payment our sins require.